BlackRock is marketing more than $12 billion in bonds to finance a roughly 1 gigawatt Meta data center campus in El Paso, Texas, Bloomberg reported July 20. The project, codenamed Sopaipilla, is owned 80 percent by BlackRock funds through its Global Infrastructure Partners and HPS units, with Meta holding 20 percent and serving as tenant and developer. JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley are running the sale, with pricing expected in late July.
Meta gets a gigawatt of capacity, due online in 2028, while carrying only a fifth of the project on its own books. The structure mirrors its roughly $30 billion Louisiana financing with Blue Owl, and it is quietly becoming the standard way hyperscale AI gets funded.
How the structure works
The bonds are issued against BlackRock’s 80 percent stake via a project entity, Sopaipilla Investor LLC, with S&P noting a senior secured tranche around $12.3 billion and total size potentially near $13 billion. Bondholders get long-dated exposure secured by Meta’s lease payments; BlackRock’s infrastructure funds get an equity position in an asset with an investment-grade anchor tenant; Meta gets the capacity without the debt. Everyone in the chain is underwriting one thing: Meta’s willingness to keep paying rent on AI compute for decades.
The signal
This is the third distinct financing pattern Meta has used in twelve months, alongside the $50 billion Hyperion buildout and its Blue Owl joint venture, while Amazon simply borrowed $25 billion on its own name. The divergence matters: Amazon puts AI debt on its balance sheet, Meta increasingly does not. As we traced in the AI capital stack, the buildout is being funded less by tech company cash flow and more by bond markets reaching for infrastructure yield. That deepens the capital pool enormously, and it means the AI buildout’s risk now sits partly with fixed-income investors who have never priced a GPU cycle before. The deal has not priced yet; the demand it draws will be the real headline.
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